


Firm Gasp

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Breathplay, Dom/sub, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-30
Updated: 2015-09-30
Packaged: 2018-04-24 05:00:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4906465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two souls in sync, two bodies like reflections in a mirror; Milady pays a visit to Athos, who pays more for his play-acting. Post 'An Ordinary Man', concerning 'Musketeers Don't Die Easily'. BDSM, erotic asphyxiation, dirty birdy romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firm Gasp

Athos wakes only when the struggle to breathe is past the point of dreaming; he opens his eyes, and there she is, her pale face floating above him like a faintly apricot-coloured harvest moon. She isn’t the half-ragged witch from the woods – her hair is tamer, and her linen smells clean – and it isn’t her fingers wrapped around his throat. For her weapon, she’s chosen his scarf, tossed idly on the chair where he throws everything else.

He ought to be afraid of her, as she looks down on him, backlit by the honest light of a watery silver moon. He ought to be afraid she’ll kill him, and it’ll be his doing, not hers. That little pantomime, that warm night, that unchaste kiss he’d hidden in her hair because it’s what he _would_ do if he were that drunk, if he could lay hands on her. He ought to be afraid because he ought to have known to go anywhere but her neck, to do anything but revisit the site of their worst and greatest battle.

He _was_ afraid, though.

He was afraid that if he went between her laces and her ribs and found warm breast, beating heart, she’d bite him bloody but do nothing he wouldn’t beg her to do again.

She braces herself on the bed beside him, one knee indenting the thin mattress.

“You will never do this to me again.” She’s tied a knot in the grey fabric, and she’s been twisting, and she keeps twisting. It’s what woke him. It’s gone far enough that his body starts to fight, but she’s rotating her wrist so slowly that he can never get further than a mild, shameful bucking, more like a boy quaking for the girl with a firm grasp on his cock than anything life-preserving. He begins to choke in earnest, to choke on the thought of that boy and that girl, and a sweet, sharp pleasure he barely remembers having had with her begins to make itself known at almost the same moment. She sees it, of course. She sees everything, but she never judges.

“I wish you still wore my locket,” Milady confides, speaking almost conversationally, speaking as if they were doing almost anything else. “I could’ve given you a scar to match mine.” Her free hand, as pale as her face, drifts over his. She presses her thumb to the very centre of his lower lip, pulls down until it can go no further, pushes up until it meets his teeth. “Two souls in sync,” she says. “Two bodies like reflections in a mirror.”

She’s getting dimmer, but he craves the grey. It makes him white out when it gets dark enough, empties him out, drains him of the sickness he has instead of desire. What manner of man lies on his back with such a woman hovering over him like a hag; what manner of man feels his power over himself come to rest in her cupped hands, the very air in his lungs cut off and conversely gifted to him in dizzying bursts by the twirl of her fingers. The knot of the tourniquet fits so neatly beneath his chin, and then there’s the electric build to the point of unconsciousness, and the blessed relief when she loosens her grip, and then there’s the desperation for her to throttle him again. He craves it. He craves her doing it, more to the point, brushing back the damp hair from his forehead and shushing him tenderly and guiding him through the nightmare until stars explode in a halo around her head.

“This is your doing,” she repeats. “You brought this on yourself.” With that little pantomime, that warm night engineered to make her cry out for d’Artagnan; she gives the scarf a particularly vicious tug. “You will _never_ do this to me again,” she says. “Never hold me like this, or hang me like this. You will _never_ touch me like this again.”

But she can touch him, if it suits her to – and it calms him, sometimes, to have his choices taken away. It arouses him, sometimes. Sometimes she took his heavy head onto her lap, in their one glorious spring, and took away first his sight, and then his hearing with her palms over his eyes, over his ears. He sleeps better when they’re too close, when he can see only her, when he can feel only her, when their love is not a choice.

“I think you’d like to die in my arms one day,” she tells him. She knows this. She knows it by the way he shudders, and so she goes even slower, because he doesn’t deserve to get what he wants when she can’t have him to play with. He deserves nothing, because he took away d’Artagnan and he took away the fat, florid idiots of Paris, but first and foremost, he took himself away, and now she has no toys to play with. “Soon,” she promises him soothingly, gazing at the blunt, handsome features she loves, at the lilac of his skin as she comes close to killing him, but not nearly close enough. His chest rattles with effort. She considers the fun they could have with a pillow, and a noose, and his sword belt, and strands of her unbound hair.

She’d do anything in the world to make him gasp.


End file.
